Carbohydrate Glycemic Index --
How It Can Help You Lose Weight

How do you make sense out of the glycemic index?

Carbohydrates are just sugars. Whatever carbohydrate you eat, whether it's table sugar or honey or a potato, is made up of sugar.

No matter what kind of sugar -- whether it is milk sugar (lactose) or fruit sugar (fructose) or whatever -- it's still sugar. And when you get it in your blood stream it's made into blood sugar (glucose).

But some things break down very rapidly. Drink a Coke and the sugar just pours into your blood stream. Eat an apple and it's a slower process.

With sugar, slower is better

Because of this scientists came up with a way to figure out which foods go into your blood stream faster. The idea is that the more slowly the sugar is released into your blood stream the better.

So they tested different foods. They had volunteers eat white bread and rice and apples -- all sorts of things -- and then they measured their blood sugar.

"You know how you wake up in the morning and sometimes you look gorgeous and other times you look like you got hit by a Mack truck?

I realized that my Mack truck is food. If I have no sugar, yeast or wine, I have no under-eye bags and my skin is perfect."

Mariska Hargitay

High glycemic, low glycemic

With some foods the blood sugar went sky high -- those are the high glycemic foods.

Sometimes the blood sugar stayed low -- those are the low glycemic foods. And they added it all up and it became the glycemic index.

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Avoid the sugar blues

You want to avoid high blood sugar levels -- which cause too much insulin to pour out -- which then cause your blood sugar to crash. That just makes you crave more junk food.

You can even get weak, sweaty, confused and irritable. When you get that from low sugar it is called "hypoglycemia."

Food tables and references

You can look at tables of low and high glycemic index foods. They will show you in detail what you should eat that is the best for controlling your blood sugar.

The original research on the glycemic index was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1981, and there is a table that shows the latest research about the glycemic index on their website.

That list is not searchable, and while it has a lot of data, reading it will probably make you dizzy.